Autism: Community organizations bringing children together

Cartoon images of bright yellow sunflowers adorned the walls. A bright red ball rolled across the floor. Artwork spattered in Elmer's Glue and string hung in the hallway.

Jennifer Seletzky-Davidson stepped in, took a sweeping look at the place and let out a big smile. This is her place. She did this.

Seletzky-Davidson is the founder and director of Amazing Kids Club, an after-school program for autistic children in Hanover. The club offers social therapy sessions in a unique group model, one that Jennifer brought to York County all by herself.

Like so many other parents out there, when Seletzky-Davidson learned that her daughter, Elizabeth, had autism, she knew very little about the disorder. So she educated herself.

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She had plans to be a police officer, but abandoned the dream and went back to school to get her degree in counseling after deciding that she wanted to play a greater role in her child's education.

The idea to open Amazing Kids Club came when Seletzky-Davidson had finished school and was working as a therapist for autistic children. She called out of work sick one day and when she returned, she was approached by a client's mother, who was upset at her for missing a day of therapy.

"The mother said that I was her son's only friend," Seletzky-Davidson said, and that he was very disappointed that his friend had missed a day of therapy.

"A light bulb went off," Seletzky-Davidson said. "I shouldn't be his only friend."

That was when Amazing Kids Club was born. Seletzky-Davidson developed a social therapy model similar to those she used herself as a therapist, but applied them to a group setting, so that autistic children could learn and make friends at the same time. She wrote a proposal and Amazing Kids Club was eventually established as a pilot program for the state.

For Pennsylvania, Seletzky-Davidson said, the idea was to reduce the amount of money that it spends on therapy services, by replacing some of the expensive one-on-one care with a cheaper group model.

For Seletzky-Davidson, the idea was just to create a place where her daughter could finally make friends and enjoy the simple pleasures of childhood, like sleepovers and play dates.

Seven years later, the program has proven its effectiveness and now serves 180 children. It has had to expand into three separate locations and now comes fully equipped with a life-skills kitchen, gym, classrooms, and a sensory room with swings and a bean bag pit for children with stimulation needs.

For Elizabeth, Amazing Kids Club definitely served its purpose. Shortly after the club opened its doors Elizabeth was invited to a friend's birthday party for the very first time, at the age of 16. The invitation was from another girl at the club.

But not everyone has had such a successful experience at Amazing Kids Club. Christian Goff first started attending the club six year ago and his mother, Kim Goff, loved it. The structure of going to the classes every day really helped him, she said, which was why she was so upset when she was told Christian had to leave because of behavioral issues.

"He needed that social therapy group to cope with outside stresses," Kim Goff said. "I didn't want him to get taken out."

Despite her outspoken pleas, Goff lost her fight with the Amazing Kids Club and Christian is still not allowed to attend classes there, nearly a year later. Even though Goff said the behavioral issues are now under control, Christian has not been permitted to return.

Now Christian has nowhere to go after school, Goff said. Amazing Kids Club is the only after-school autism program in the area and now that it has been taken out of the picture, Kim and her son are out of options.

For her part, Seletzky-Davidson understands Amazing Kids Club's unique position as the only program for autistic children in the community. In rural areas like Hanover, Seletzky-Davidson said, it is especially important that organizations like Amazing Kids Club serve as many children as possible.

That's why Seletzky-Davidson designed the club to serve all ends of the autism spectrum, from children with mild forms such as asperger's syndrome to those who are nonverbal, which is unusual for any single organization to do.

"In rural areas you can't say that someone is too autistic and that they should find somewhere else to go," Seletzky-Davidson said. "There is nowhere else to go."

Today, the club even has special classrooms and instructors just for children with limited verbal skills like Christian, but since it also serves such a broad range of children, the club is not always able to deal with the most difficult cases.

When a child becomes a sustained danger to himself and to others, Seletzky-Davidson said, that is when a child's team gets together and decides whether or not it's time for them to leave. That team is made up of Amazing Kids Club therapists, parents, wraparound service providers and Community Care Behavioral Health or CCBH.

CCBH is a private organization tasked with divvying out Medicaid funds. Every hour of therapy that children receive from Amazing Kids Club must be preapproved by CCBH.

And in an age of increasingly tightened budgets and limited funding, Seletzky-Davidson admitted, CCBH has made it harder and harder for students to get approved to attend Amazing Kids Club every day of the week, as many students used to be able to.

Although Seletzky-Davidson said that these cuts have not led to an increase in children getting cut from the program altogether, Amazing Kids Club is under direct pressure to show that its students are making progress, and as a result, cutting down on the costs of other types of Medicaid-funded services, like wraparound therapists.

"If we weren't effective, we wouldn't be funded," Seletzky-Davidson said.

But, she added, that effectiveness is measured differently for students on different ends of the spectrum. A nonverbal child is not expected to move at the same pace as a child with asperger's in order to stay in the program, Seletzky-Davidson said.